Vocab Test 1

Accommodation: A way to modify the schema to include new information
Visual Accommodation: the lens flips an image and focuses the inverted image before passing through the retina
Action Potential: The electrical impulse created by the positive charge; the cell has reached the electrical threshold
Circadian Rhythm: defines the wake/sleep cycle; ebbs and flows for roughly 24 hours without external cues
Behaviorism: Focuses on observing and controlling behavior; Focuses on observing and controlling behavior through what is observable. Puts an emphasis on learning and internal mental states.
Single-Blind Study: Participants do not know whether they belong to the control or experimental group
Double-Blind Study: Neither the experimenter nor the participants know to which group the participants belong
Broca’s Aphasia: Can understand speech but can’t form the words
Classical Conditioning: tricking the person into associating something with fear; being conditioned to reflect a certain behavior; associating an involuntary response and a stimulus
Operant conditioning: associates a voluntary behavior with a consequence
Cognition: the mental activity associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communication; a deeply complex set of activities that allows us to process new information
Conditioned Response: Behavior that is considered a reflex or automatic response, paired with a conditional stimulus
Conditioned Stimulus: A neutral stimulus paired with the unconditioned response becomes part of a new stimulus-response association; Anything we can perceive, hear, smell, feel, see, or taste
Conditioning: Reinforcement and punishment; the process of training or accustoming a person or animal to behave in a certain way or to accept certain circumstances.
Consciousness: our state of awareness of our existence, sensations, thoughts, and environments; process underlying the mental model we create of the world of which we are aware; allows us to retrieve a fact, an idea, an emotion, or a memory and combine it with critical thinking
Control Group: A comparison group that doesn’t receive the treatment
Correlation: finding the relationship between 2 variables
Positive Correlation: the independent and dependent variables move together in the same direction
Negative correlation: the variables have an inverse relationship, and move in opposite directions
Illusionary correlation: an expected or suspected relationship that doesn’t empirically exist
Independent Variable: The variable that the experimenter manipulates
Dependent Variable: The variable that researchers measure
John B. Watson: Known as the founder of Behaviorism; Believed that behavior needs to be observable to be objectively and empirically measured; Baby Albert experiment
Stanley Milgram: Why do people obey authority when it goes against morals; Obedience Study
Charles Darwin: Created the basic principle of natural selections; That given a range of possible inherited trait variations, those traits that lead to increased reproduction and survival of the species are most likely to be passed down to generations
Sigmund Freud: Created the psychoanalytic theory; Emphasized the role of the unconscious, a depository of memories, feelings, and drives, many of the unwanted, that are beyond the reach of conscious awareness
Displacement: occurs when aggressive urges are shifted toward a recipient other than the one who engendered the feelings; redirecting a negative emotion from its original source to a less threatening recipient
Experimental Group: The group in which the independent variable is manipulated
Experimenter Bias: an error resulting from the experimenters’ unconscious expectations of results, can interfere with the objective outcome of a study
Extinction: a process that leads to the gradual weakening and eventual disappearance of the conditioned response to the conditioned stimulus
Frontal Lobe: Part of the brain directly behind the forehead and above the eyes; Decision-making, problem-solving, reasoning, planning, personality and language, motivation and exercise of willpower, executive functions
Generalization: Applying what they learn to all people of a population
Gestalt: Explores the idea that although a sensory experience can be broken down into individual parts, how those parts relate to each other as a whole is often what the individual responds to in perception
Hierarchy of Needs: Physiological: breathing, food, water, etc; Safety; Love/belonging; Esteem; Self-Actualization; Being deprived of a need arouses a feeling called a DRIVE or DESIRE
Id: holds our wants and desires (motivated by sex and aggression)
Ego: allows people to get what they want and desire within the confines set by society (balances the other two)
Superego: acts as our conscience and leads us to do the right thing
Just Noticeable Difference: the smallest amount that two stimuli have to differ for us to be able to tell them apart
Mean: The average number in a data set; is the most commonly reported measure of central tendency
Median: The middle number in a set of scores; Needs to be put in numerical order
Mode: The most frequently occurring score in a data set
Naturalistic Observation: Observation of humans or animals in a natural setting
Structuralism: Breaking down the conscious experience into basic components of “structures” using introspective techniques, examining, and putting them back together
Psychoactive Drugs: chemical substances that alter perceptions, mood, or behavior; can change consciousness by changing brain chemistry through their specific effects on neurotransmitters
Neurotransmitter: Chemicals in the brain
Placebo: People don’t receive real treatment; a real response, positive or negative, action or substance is based solely on expectations, not on the actual properties of the action or substance
Plasticity: The ability of the brain to create new neurons, form new neural connections, and recruit neurons from other parts of the brain to perform functions once performed by damaged neurons
Psychiatrist: medical doctors who can prescribe medication, find the right medications to successfully treat disorders, and monitor their effectiveness and side effects
Psychoanalysis: The idea that each of us has an unconscious part whose existence, activities, and thoughts are hidden behind a mental barrier that we can’t voluntarily remove; Behind the barrier are repressed and psychologically dangerous thoughts that give rise to unconscious conflicts that can result in psychological and physical symptoms
Random Assignment: A process that ensures all members of the sample have an equal chance of being placed into either the control or the experimental group
Random Sample: Each member of the population has the same chance of getting into the sample as any other member
Range: represents the span of the scores in a data set
Regression: When adult defense mechanisms stop working for us, we regress to a personality we had in childhood; immature patterns of behavior emerge; a return to earlier stages of development and abandoned forms of gratification belonging to them
Repression: the person forces the unacceptable or threatening feeling out of awareness to a point where he/she becomes unaware of it
Schema: mental filters or maps that organize our information about the world
Selection Bias: introduced by the selection of individuals, groups, or data for analysis in such a way that proper randomization is not achieved
Sensation: the process by which our brain and nervous system receive input from the environment through our 5 senses
Unconscious mind: an invisible force deep within our minds, a series of unaware conflicts between competing parts of our personalities that influence our behavior; cognition thought without awareness; involves levels of brain systems that range from autopilot to those which can have subtle influences on consciousness and behavior
Survey: An inexpensive and quick way of gaining information about an individual’s opinions, attitudes, and perceptions; Participants receive a list of questions to answer; Usually interview format
Theory: A coherent explanation or interpretation of facts and observations that have been identified in past studies
Confounding variable: extraneous factors that can interfere with the independent variable and therefore have an impact on the outcome of the study
Validity: Whether the assessment measures what it claims to measure
Variable: anything that can change or be changed
Wernicke’s Aphasia: They can speak, but can’t understand language, therefore what they say doesn’t make sense